Jack Del Rio is a safe choice for the Raiders. He might even be a good one.

Jim Tomsula is a comfortable choice for the 49ers. He might even be the right one.

But sometimes, safe and comfortable are exactly not the sort of head coaching hires that work at all. What was Jim Harbaugh when the 49ers hired him in 2011, fresh off his triumph at Stanford but with assistant coaching experience in the NFL? He was the necessary choice. Almost everybody knew it. That’s what you want.

As I write this, Del Rio is expected to be officially announced as the Raiders’ next head coach any minute. Tomsula is reportedly going to accept the 49ers’ job. So. Which of the two guys most falls into the “necessary” category?

Del Rio gets my nod on that one. The Raiders needed to make a hire that was not an experiment and a hopeful wish, as Dennis Allen was in 2011. Allen had been the Broncos’ defensive coordinator and had spent time as a successful assistant coach in New Orleans, but he had not been a head coach. It turned out that he had trouble figuring how much of a grip to keep on the steering wheel. He initially let his assistants have too much responsibility. By the time Allen figured out he needed to be more in total charge, the players had lost their confidence in him.

Del Rio was a head coach in Jacksonville for nine seasons. He reached the playoffs twice. One of his Jaguar teams beat the Steelers in the playoffs. At Pittsburgh. I repeat: Del Rio won a playoff game with the Jacksonville Jaguars, the one NFL organization that has stumbled and struggled–often with as many empty seats at home games–as much as the Raiders over the past 10 years. This feat earns my respect. No Raiders’ head coach since 2002 has accomplished anything remotely close to that.

Yes, Del Rio finished his time in Jacksonville with a 68-71, slightly below .500. But the Jaguars’ record since Del Rio was fired after Week 12 of 2011 is . . . wait for it . . . 11-42. Which is way below .500.

As a former NFL linebacker and Pro Bowl player, Del Rio also has a real presence. When he addresses the Raider players for the first time, he will have much more credibility than Allen did when he first spoke to the team. That qualifies as “necessary” in my book. I’m not saying Del Rio will fix the Raiders quickly or awesomely. But he is an upgrade from Allen — and from interim head coach Tony Sparano, too, despite Sparano’s own previous head coaching experience. Del Rio is also an upgrade from Lane Kiffin, Tom Cable, Art Shell . . . well, you get the idea That is also “necessary.”

I give the Raiders a B+ on the hire. The only way they would likely have been able to hire someone better was by ditching general manager Reggie McKenzie and allowing the new coach to have control over the roster. Raiders owner Mark Davis apparently decided not to do that, once Harbaugh was off the table as a candidate.

Tomsula is more of a mystery in the “necessary” category. He might be more so than we know. For all the leaks about Harbaugh’s status over the course of the season, the 49ers managed to keep a lot of the locker room gossip under wraps. There was possibly more going on than we know in terms of internal turbulence.

I think. But you’d better keep checking your favorite Bay Area News Group web site and updating every five minutes, just in case.

Meanwhile, the A’s general manager conducted a media conference call last weekend after his best deal of the postseason – acquiring Ben Zobrist and Yunel Escobar from Tampa Bay for catcher John Jaso and two good prospects. During the call, Beane was in his characteristic feisty mood.

Can’t blame him. Feistiness and boldness are how Beane has made his bones over the years.
So he didn’t waver when I asked him a question that many A’s fans have asked me during this offseason, during which Beane has turned over roughly 40 percent of the team’s roster.

The A’s fans tend to respect Beane for the job he’s done keeping the A’s competitive. But the fans also wonder if he could do the same thing by keeping around more of their favorite players for longer than just one or two seasons.

I understand that sentiment. Fans like to take a ride with their team for various reasons. One of them is being able to develop a connection with a favorite player or two or three.

This is what the Giants have done across the Bay, holding onto personalities such as Buster Posey, Hunter Pence, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and (until this winter) Pablo Sandoval for several seasons — as well as winning a lot of games and trophies.

Faced with budget restrictions on payroll and the need to constantly retool, Beane has traded away A’s All-Stars and popular personalities such as Yoenis Cespedes, Josh Donaldson and . . . well, Mark Mulder and Nick Swisher, if you want to go back that far. Following the offseason Beane shuffle, the A’s have only two everyday players returning from 2014—outfielders Josh Reddick and Coco Crisp. Platoon catcher Stephen Vogt is also back. That’s it.

Now, I’m not certain that John Jaso had that large a fan club. But the conference call seemed a good time to ask how Beane would respond to the sentiment that it’s difficult for a fan to follow the A’s–at least in the same deep-attachment way that fans follow other teams.

“I don’t know if I even understand the question,” Beane first answered, showing you how far outside his realm of thought such a notion was.

So I tried to rephrase in a more pointed fashion. I asking if there was any jersey of any A’s player that a fan could buy with the knowledge that the jersey would still be viable in four or five years.

“I’m not sure that’s true of any team,” Beane said, which is correct.

But he absolutely knew what I meant. And he had his feisty answer ready.Continue Reading →

Am working on a column for Friday’s print editions about Thursday’s news that Boston has been selected as the United States candidate city to host the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Basically, my column will say that the Bay Area was fortunate not to be picked and I’ll explain why. The column should also be up online within a couple of hours.

Mainly, however, the decision by the US Olympic Committee not to anoint the local bid as the best one of the four competing cities just proves I was correct last June when I wrote that the Bay Area proposal had almost zero chance of succeeding.

Not to say I told you so but . . . I told you so.

And for reference purposes, here was that previous column.

Purdy: San Francisco Olympics in 2024 unlikely

By Mark Purdy
Mercury News Columnist
June 14, 2014

Consumer tip: Do not start saving up money to buy those tickets for a 2024 Bay Area Olympics just yet.

In fact, by my estimation, odds are 99-1 against the games ever happening here. Admittedly, those are unscientific odds. They are based solely on my four decades of covering the Olympic landscape. The actual odds could be much worse.

Frankly, it came as a surprise last week when the United States Olympic Committee announced that San Francisco was one of four cities identified as “potential candidates” for a USA bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in just 10 years. The other three cities were Los Angeles, Boston and Washington.

Why was it such an eyebrow raiser to see San Francisco’s name on that list? Because it was the first time most of us knew that anyone in Northern California even had any interest in the 2024 Games.

It turns out that the USOC sent out letters to 35 cities, asking if there was interest in bidding for the 2024 Games. San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, decided to respond in the affirmative, along with five other cities. And wow, what do you know? Lee made the cut down to four! Sounds like it was the equivalent of getting one of those letters from a time-share condo resort that begin: “You may have won, if you reply now!”

In fairness, Lee did do a little groundwork. He assembled a few people to examine the Olympic possibilities. The group includes Anne Cribbs, who worked so strenuously and passionately to help assemble Bay Area bids for the 2012 and 2016 Games — both of which ultimately failed.

“It’s really preliminary,” said Cribbs of this potential bid. “It’s all just exploratory.”

The exploration surely will uncover nothing new. We all know that San Francisco cannot be the host “city” for any Olympics in a singular sense. It’s too small a municipality, both in population and square mileage. Thus, any local bid for the Olympics must involve the entire Bay Area, with the bulk of events taking place outside San Francisco.

And therein lies the rub.

Like so many outside entities, the U.S. Olympic Committee doesn’t “get” how Northern California works. That effectively doomed previous Olympic bids.

Yes, San Francisco is our undeniable postcard/tourist capital. But eight of 10 people in the Bay Area live somewhere else. More dwell in San Jose, which is the larger city. The area’s business capital is in Silicon Valley. The education capitals are in Berkeley and Palo Alto. Right now, Oakland might be the Bay Area hipster capital. Marin County has its own center of attitudinal gravity.

In other words, this isn’t like other metropolitan areas in America, which have one dominant city and entirely subservient suburbs. Each corner of the Bay Area has its own vibe and agenda. Getting all the political entities on the same page is terribly difficult.

But incredibly, with Cribbs and her people working overtime, such cooperation actually occurred in 2002. That’s when the Bay Area made its last serious run at an Olympics, bidding for the 2012 Games. The plan was realistic and budget conscious. The proposed track and field venue was the old Stanford Stadium. Other events were assigned to existing facilities all around the bay. The Athletes Village was planned for Moffett Field in Mountain View.

The USOC shot down the bid dismissively, saying that too much stuff was too far apart.

In response, Bay Area Olympic boosters submitted an alternate and more compact plan in a bid for the 2016 Games four years later. The fulcrum was a proposed new 49ers stadium at Candlestick Point that would serve as the primary venue. But the football team felt it was being ramrodded into accepting the plan. As discussions disintegrated, the Olympic bid went south, and so did the 49ers — who grew tired of dealing with Mayor Gavin Newsom’s imperiousness and evacuated to Santa Clara.

Which (shock!) proved once more that San Francisco can’t go solo on something like this. To his credit, Mayor Lee says he will reach out to other Bay Area mayors who are interested. But time is relatively short. The bid must be submitted by 2017. Plus, the USOC may still decide to not even submit an American bid this time around. Stiff global competition such as Paris and Rome and Istanbul are expected to compete against any USA bid.

Cribbs is still not dissuaded. She thinks the bid-selection process is more fair than it was in 2002 and worth pursuing. As a teenager, she won a gold medal in swimming at the 1960 Rome Games and has been a lifelong Olympic evangelist.

“I love the Olympic Games, and I love the Bay Area,” she said Saturday. “I could still see them here. After we didn’t get the bid for 2012, I could still drive by Moffett Field and see the Olympic Village that would have been there.”

The 2024 Bay Area Olympics is also a nice vision to embrace. Don’t expect to ever actually touch it.

Read Mark Purdy’s blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/purdy. Contact him at mpurdy@mercurynews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MercPurdy.

The NFL’s ongoing dance with Los Angeles is so old, I think it began when people were jitterbugging.

However, it would be a mistake to poo-pooh this week’s news that St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke has plans to join a development firm and build a stadium at the former site of Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood. The proposal seems to be the most serious of the many that have been floated to bring a pro football team back to the LA area.

And as such, it definitely affects the Raiders and their own search for a new stadium in the East Bay or elsewhere. My opinion: This development should help keep the team in Oakland longer.

Details of the new LA plan were contained in this LA Times story by former Mercury News staffer Sam Farmer . If the plan continues on its path, the Rams would clearly be the team most likely to occupy the new venue. And depending on which speculative spin you believe, it either increases the chance that the Raiders would join the Rams for a two-team Los Angeles re-invasion to make the stadium a more cost effective project . . . or it shuts out the Raiders from a move to Los Angeles in the near future because the Rams don’t want to initially split the attention or the corporate sponsorships or the season ticket audience at the new stadium.

One day last month, I chose not to spend an afternoon poking sharp needles into my eyes. I decided instead to do something just slightly less painful:

Fill out my Baseball Hall of Fame ballot.

As the years pass, the privilege of voting for the men who will enter Cooperstown has felt less like a privilege than a trip through a gauntlet of Madison Bumgarner fastballs.
I am still proud to participate in the annual election. The results will be announced Tuesday morning. Complaints will follow immediately.

That’s fine. But those who say we voters are arrogant writers who shut out other groups from participating seem to forget that we do not demand to vote. We are asked. The Cooperstown elders who set up the selection procedure in 1936 decided that baseball journalists would be the most objective people to pick Hall of Famers.

Argue with that contention, if you wish. But as long as my vote is requested—and I’ve been voting for 25 years now, after passing the 10-year mark as a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America—then I will take the duty very seriously. Every other voter I know does the same thing.

This year was as tough a ballot as ever, owing to a raft of first-time eligible players. We can vote for up to 10 names. Yet in my mind, Cooperstown is for the best of the best, not just the best. I am extremely conservative with my selections. I usually vote for only a three or four players, the cream of names on the ballot. Because this field was so stacked, I voted for five. It could be an all-time personal high.

Here is the Director’s Cut of my column that will run in Sunday morning’s editions, trimmed to a shorter length. This longer version contains an extra quote from Arizona coach Bruce Arians that I found relevant, plus some of the wilder (or maybe not) gossip about the 49er trinity’s dysfunction. The column:

Want my prediction?

In a dozen years or so, all three men will laugh about this.

Or perhaps they will cry.

Either way, with the benefit of hindsight, they will wonder and feel remorse over how they got so far off track.

In fact, that could even be the case right now.

I suspect that if you peeled enough layers away from their public countenances, you would find there are already some real feelings of regret inside Jim Harbaugh, Trent Baalke and Jed York.

The 49ers play their final game of the season Sunday at Levi’s Stadium. The foregone conclusion is that it will be Harbaugh’s last game as the team’s head coach, owing to disagreements and sandpaper-grating personality differences with owner York and general manager Baalke.

And, yes, it all could have been prevented.

Bruce Arians, who will coach the Arizona Cardinals against the 49ers at Levi’s Stadium, was on a telephone conference call with Bay Area writers last week and also seemed mystified by the 49ers’ intramural meltdown.
“Very shocking to me, yes,” Arians said. “Jimmy’s done an unbelievable job. One bad season shouldn’t deter from what they’ve built there.”

No. It shouldn’t. But in mulling over the whole 49er mess of the past six months involving the Harbaugh-Baalke-York disconnect, I was struck with this realization: All three men are basically still serving their first term of NFL office. All are holding their current position for the first time in pro football.

This isn’t insignificant.

York has been the 49ers’ chief executive officer for five years. He’d apprenticed in the family football business but had never previously been in complete charge as controlling owner.

Baalke has been the team’s GM for four years. He’d never before held such a position.

Harbaugh has been the 49ers’ head coach for four years. He’d done that job at the college level but not in the NFL.
Three men. All undeniably smart. All ambitious. All successful in earlier endeavors. And all without as much experience or perspective as many others in America’s most popular and visible sports league.

Perhaps four or five years in a position seems like a long time to you. But learning the ropes of any high-level NFL job is not for the faint of heart. With the big money involved, the pressure to build (and fill) stadiums and find corporate sponsors, the crazy attention paid to every single utterance and burp and transaction and third-quarter choice to not punt on fourth down . . . trust me, it can greatly throw off a person’s world view and perspective. From inside the NFL bubble, having the patience to take a deep breath and see a bigger picture is a rare quality and possibly impossible without years and years of experience.

The Harbaugh-Baalke-York situation was likely compounded by the fact that they were all immensely triumphant, directly out of the starting gate. York became team president in 2009 and CEO the following year. Harbaugh and Baalke were appointed to their positions in early 2011. Twelve months later, the 49ers were playing in the NFC title game. The following season, they were in the Super Bowl. Each of the three men, with reason, surely believed they had all the right answers in terms of creating championship fabric.

That fabric, though, was always a weave of egos and hard-work intensity. And when slight rips in the fabric developed, they turned into large gashes way too quickly. When York decided to back up Baalke more often in disagreements with Harbaugh, the ultimate outcome was inevitable.

(This is the column about the new Cuba-USA diplomacy–and the sports ramifications–that was scheduled to appear in Friday’s print edition. Then the A’s made their latest trade and the bosses understandably needed to use the space for that story. So I’m posting the column here in the blog. It may end up running in Saturday’s paper, assuming Billy Beane doesn’t deal away any more players for a few hours. Meanwhile, here’s the column:)

I won’t ever forget the crowd. How it sounded. How it looked.

I have been to many stadiums in many countries. But when I turned the corner in Havana for this particular baseball game, the experience was like nothing else. This was in 1991. The United States was playing Cuba in the Pan American Games. From the street, I could hear the buzz and see that nearly all 55,000 seats of Estadio Latinoamericano were filled. Sirens and horns were sounding.

And it was more than two hours before the first pitch. Batting practice hadn’t even started.
Cubans love their sports. Cubans especially love baseball. When I heard this week’s news that the United States and Cuba were moving toward normalization of diplomatic relations, I immediately thought about that day at the Estadio. And I wondered how soon a Major League team will set up a spring training camp in Havana.

Because that is going to happen. Not sure when. But sooner than we probably think. And it will be a very cool thing.

I will allow the statesmen to sort out the messy details of how the new USA-Cuba policy is going to work across the board in terms of politics and business and human rights. I only feel qualified to comment on one particular area of the relations between the two countries – the sports area.

My comment would be this: “Can’t wait to see where this goes from here, because I can see mostly good stuff—and perhaps overwhelmingly fantastic stuff–coming out of it.”

When this newspaper sent me to Cuba for those three weeks in 1991, I expected to learn much about the island nation that had been under socialist/communist rule since Fidel Castro’s revolution of 1959. I did not expect to learn that Cubans might be more passionate fans than you will find in any American sports bar.

One of those fans was Fidel himself. I had a close personal encounter with him – at a bowling alley, of all places – where I came face to face with the maximum leader and we nodded at each other as he walked to his seat to watch the competition. It was a seat that I had been occupying by mistake. I agreed to move when Fidel’s pistol-packing bodyguards showed up. Which explains why I am still alive to write this column. (You can read my original 1991 column about that episode here.)

Baseball, however, was the main Pan-Am Games attraction. The sport was introduced to the island in the 19th century and never lost its grip on the population. Since 1991, MLB teams have visited the country for exhibition games, to warm receptions. And of course, Cuba has produced some of today’s most exciting MLB players including Yasiel Puig, Jose Abreu and Yoenis Cespedes.

The news of Cuba’s new diplomatic relations with the United States hit me in a special place. Twenty-three years ago, the Mercury News sent me to Havana for three weeks. I was there to cover the Pan American Games. But I wound up writing just as much about Cuba’s culture as the sports events. And living in the country for those three weeks was a rich and fascinating experience.

An experience, I should mention, that included a somewhat dramatic face-to-face encounter with Fidel Castro at a bowling alley.

Yes, really.

I’ve been telling that story at dinner parties and during Rotary Club speeches for the last two decades. But I hadn’t gone back to see my original column about it. My column for Friday’s print editions will be about the sports ramifications of the new USA-Cuba policy. To research it, I went back in the Mercury News archives to read my stuff from 1991 about that trip. The Fidel-at-the-bowling-alley column was just as much fun as I remembered. And as far as I am concerned, it was the first thaw in USA-Cuba relations that led to this week’s dramatic developments.

I decided to cut and paste the column in the blog because I thought readers might get a kick out of it. Here goes:

Note: The original version of this blog post was updated Wednesday night with new information.

The NFL announced its new “Personal Conduct Policy” on Wednesday morning, with commissioner Roger Goodell saying all the right things.

But the devil, as always, will be in the details. Especially when the league tries to implement the new program.

Right now, the NFL Players Association says it deserved to have a say in the policy through collective bargaining. They have a point.

Jim Harbaugh, the 49ers head coach, said he didn’t wish to comment on the new policy until he was able to study it. The players available in the locker room Wednesday mostly said the same. That’s understandable. But this story has legs. It’s not going away. And as we all know, the 49ers have a rather personal interest in what any change in the current policy might be.

For example, from my initial reading of the new policy, the case of 49ers defensive lineman Ray McDonald from earlier this season would have been handled entirely differently under the new protocol.

McDonald was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence at his home on August 31 and the 49ers did not suspend him, saying they wanted to let “due process” play out before taking any action — even though Baltimore running back Ray Rice was serving a two-week suspension at the time for his domestic violence charge (a punishment later increased to an indefinite suspension) and 29 other NFL players were serving suspensions, most for performance-enhancing substance abuse but one for intoxication/manslaughter as well as several that were listed as “undetermined.” McDonald subsequently played in every 49ers game and on November 10, the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office announced it would not be filing charges in the McDonald case, saying it felt there was not enough evidence to get a conviction.

It sounds as if, should the new policy have been in effect this season, it’s possible that McDonald could have been suspended by the NFL until its own investigation had been included, even if the 49ers wished to let “due process” take its course. The NFL “flow chart” for the new policy issued by the league states:

“An individual may be put on paid leave if formally charged
with a violent crime or sexual assault, or if the NFL
investigation finds sufficient credible evidence that it
appears a violation of the policy has occurred. Paid leave
will last until the completion of the NFL investigation or
disposition of a criminal charge.”

That sounds very much as if the new NFL investigative unit could have put McDonald on paid leave until the league’s investigation was concluded or until the criminal charge was filed or not filed. However, 49ers spokesman Bob Lange said Wednesday night that the team’s legal advisors had consulted with the league earlier in the day after the new policy had been reached. The legal team received clarification on the general topic of suspensions for domestic violence. Here’s what Lange passed on from the lawyers:

“Although there could be circumstances under which the Commissioner determines that in the absence of criminal charges an employee should be placed on paid administrative leave during a league investigation, the policy sets the general threshold for paid administrative leave as charges being filed (through an indictment or prosecutor otherwise filing charges) for a crime of violence. The prosecutor declined to file charges against Ray. There is no reason to believe that McDonald’s case would have been treated any differently under the new Personal Conduct Policy.”

If that is correct, then it would appear that the NFL policy is still not as strong as policies on domestic violence in other major North American pro leagues, as Goodell’s statements Wednesday strongly implied. For example, under National Hockey League policy, Los Angeles Kings player Slava Voynov was arrested on domestic violence charges in September and suspended immediately by the league. He was charged a month later and the suspension continues.

To me, it sounds as if the NFL is still trying to figure out things, even after wrestling with the issue for months. And the truth is, we’ll never really know what would have happened in the McDonald case. But strictly in my opinion, it’s hard to imagine the league would not have been sensitive to the landscape that existed at the time of McDonald’s arrest–with the Ray Rice case gurgling through mainstream America, as well as the Greg Hardy case being debated. Given that landscape, I still believe that it’s likely the NFL would have implemented the new “paid leave” ersatz suspension in the McDonald case.

I’ll also note that the commissioner’s memo to league owners this week pointedly mentions how “standards that apply in a workplace are substantially different from those that apply in the criminal justice system.” If anyone was vague about what that really means, here is another passage from the Goodell memo:

“If you are convicted of a crime or subject to a disposition of a criminal proceeding (as
defined in this Policy), you are subject to discipline. But even if your conduct does not result in a
criminal conviction, if the league finds that you have engaged in any of the following conduct, you
will be subject to discipline.”

This paragraph is followed by a list of the banned conduct–stalking, domestic violence, possession of a gun in the workplace, etc.–and then contains a paragraph that explains how the commissioner expects the facts to be determined: Continue Reading →

With the Raiders-49ers game scheduled for Sunday at O.co Coliseum, the countdown clock continues on a stadium deal that Raiders owner Mark Davis is seeking for the team in Oakland. The Raiders have only one more home game in 2014, against Buffalo on December 21. Will that be the Raiders’ last game in their ancestral home? The team’s lease expires after this season, when it would be free to leave the East Bay for any other destination, subject to NFL approval.

There was a potential significant development earlier this week that I can report for the first time. On Tuesday afternoon at Raiders’ headquarters, team officials met with Floyd Kephart, the city and county’s new hope for assembling a development proposal on the Coliseum property that would satisfy the Raiders and/or A’s.

Kephart, a San Diego financier, was granted an exclusive 90-day negotiating agreement on October 21 by the Oakland City Council. As of Friday, therefore, he has 45 days remain to sign up at least one team for his vision of the “Coliseum City” project that Oakland and Alameda County representatives seek to build on the acreage that includes the current stadium and arena property, the Coliseum parking lots and land across the Nimitz Freeway.

The proposed 800-acre Coliseum City project would include sports venues, housing, hotels, retail and office buildings. Kephart has said he knows investors who would be interested in constructing a deal, which would cost billions. But to satisfy Oakland, he must get the Raiders or A’s to officially engage in the project. So far, neither team has.

One Raider source confirmed last Tuesday’s meeting but would reveal no details or when another meeting might be scheduled. Davis, who has examined possibilities for a new Raiders stadium in San Antonio and Los Angeles, said this week that his first preference would still be Oakland if the proper terms are settled.

“We’re trying like hell to get something done,” Davis told me in a brief phone interview, then referenced the Raiders’ home victory over the Kansas City Chiefs that attracted a sellout crowd of loud, supportive fans earlier this month. “That Thursday night game against Kansas City shows you the kind of fan loyalty we have here. You can’t buy that anywhere.”Continue Reading →